The wage gap is simply the average earnings of men and women working full time. It does not count for different job positions, hours worked or different jobs. It has nothing to do with the same job. It has nothing to do with discrimination.[1]
To get around the lack of a wage gap in ‘like to like’ job comparisons, the contemporary approach seeks equality of outcome regardless of the different choices that men and women make and a host of other factors relevant to earnings in the paid workforce that are not based on any unjust discrimination.[2]
Equality of outcome in earnings is as simplistic and unjust as any other equality of outcome ideology, such as socialism or identity politics. This is because equality of outcome necessitates unjust discrimination against individuals from non-preferred groups to ensure the preferred group achieves the desired outcome.
What justice requires in terms of equality is that everyone has an equal opportunity under the law. Laws must not discriminate among individuals based on their status, connections, identity group or any other form of cronyism. In other words, equality of opportunity necessitates that laws be implemented impartially, free of any biases or preferences.
Advocates of social justice who extend the equality concept beyond this procedural view of justice to look at outcomes, judge people as members of groups rather than as individuals.[3] However, justice is owed to individuals, not to abstract identity groups.
Equality of outcome is the corruption of justice and, in practice, it simply doesn’t work anyway. This is because any economic system that is not based on price signals from the market or any social system that is not based on individual merit in employment or individual need in welfare programs, is in essence a crony system that will result in impoverishment for all, including the cronies eventually, as the system fails.
Sources
[1] ShoeOnHead, “but, muh wage gap”, 1 February 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjWBXbGVyQU
[2] Daisy Cousens, “Equal Pay Day is BOGUS! | Gender Pay Gap”, 28 August 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w5Ob3S1-G0
[3] Liberalism and Cronyism: Two Rival Political and Economic Systems by Randall G. Holcombe and Andrea M. Castillo, Mercatus Center, George Mason University, Arlington, VA, 2013, p.75
Copyright 2020 All Shallows Are Clear
Policy Statement – The Wage Gap is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.